More than twenty-five years have passed since I moved to the North Country. I find it so strange that I’ve become old enough to say “a quarter of a century” in reference to a single phase of my life.
Such were my thoughts during a recent meandering drive over back roads with a friend who was raised in this area. Wherever we went, he had a story, a memory woven into the landscape.
A cabin where he’d spent summers as a child. Places where the landscape itself had changed—long-gone swamps now meadow green. Houses where his family had lived, brooks where he had fished.
I recalled a similar drive not long after I came to the North Country. I was with a new friend who’d lived here all his life. I did not understand, then, the proprietary pleasure he took in the land down each dusty road.
But on my recent drive, I had memories, too.
Places I’d lived. Roads where I’d struggled through mud to take students home after school. Grassy plots with new houses where I could remember an old, crumbling barn disassembling itself year by year with odd grace.
As my memories wove themselves through trees and fields, I felt a tug of intertwining bonds … the proprietary pleasure that once I did not understand. A quiet sort of ownership, though I hold no deeds to the lands where my memories resonate.
And I remembered a different friend from my early North Country years. He told me he’d tried to leave several times. Annually, he talked of moving “before the snow flies.” One night, he laughed and said he was held here by “Vermont’s velvet green chains.”
It is a phrase I’ve never forgotten, and in this rain-washed verdant spring, I understand it more deeply than ever before.
Somehow, my life has become entwined in the woods. Baptized in the brooks. My footprints are invisibly imprinted along trails and dirt roads I’ve walked. Students who once laughed in my classroom lie in carefully tended cemeteries, lost before their time. Churches hidden in the hills hosted marriages of kids who shared their lives with me.
Do we become a part of a place? Or does the place become a part of us?
Which are the roots, which the branches?
All I know, now, is that it feels like a blessing to be here in the North Country. A place where I can mark the fall of an old familiar tree. A place where houses are referred to by the names of residents who have long passed on but are remembered still.
A place where I note with regret new houses on once-grassy knolls. Where my mind’s eye holds fresh the image of a barn sinking into the earth, as if going home.
A place I hold in my heart, or that holds me … or both.
I spent my early childhood in Virginia. My mother was a gracious lady, blue-blooded in the traditions of Southern hospitality. The rules of Southern culture declare that until a guest sits down and, at the very least, is sipping a cup of something, you’ve failed to discharge your hallowed duty as a hostess.
A lady’s good manners and breeding (as they say in the South) are largely measured by her ability to put guests at ease.
While I lived in California, there was little conflict with these Southern-bred values. There, someone who drops by for a cup of tea might well end up staying until their next life transition.
I didn’t realize how thoroughly I’d absorbed my early indoctrination until I moved to the North Country. Here, I consistently failed to get visitors to sit down. Never mind getting them to take a cup of anything.
Half the time, heck, I couldn’t even get them to come inside.
How many conversations have you had standing in door-yards, driveways, on front steps, and—the perennial North Country favorite—just inside the kitchen door?
Now, more than twenty years after moving here, I understand that manners and breeding have not failed me.
The truth is, real Vermonters don’t sit down.
This strikes me as especially peculiar given our climate. I’ve held extended conversations standing in the cold drizzle of April rains. I’ve shivered through interesting chats at eighteen degrees, buffeted by windchill in the single digits. I’ve listened to Vermont stories while swatting at clouds of blackflies and have been sunburned during dooryard sociability at the height of summer.
I consulted with one of my native Vermont friends about this phenomenon. She offered the explanation that Vermonters have an intense respect for others’ privacy. It goes along with their fiercely independent natures.
Vermonters, she said, “don’t want to intrude.”
Okay. I surrender. Come on over and don’t have a cup of tea.
Drop on by, and we’ll stand by the door and talk awhile.
Stacking wood is an art. A woodpile made by a master has the rhyme and rhythm of a well-crafted poem.
It’s true. Ask anyone who remembers what it was like the first time they tried to create a pile from a heap of wood chunks. Ask them what the woodpile looked like. If they’re honest, they’ll tell tales of leaning, lurching stacks of wood that couldn’t be trusted to stay put when left alone.
This is a craft that cannot be taught. I’ve watched many wood wizards in my time, but I never learned a thing. The best of them seem to just plunk one log atop another. But even in my earliest days of close encounters of the loggy kind, I knew it wasn’t that simple. I plunked and my pile hunkered like a malevolent creature, plotting the right moment to turn and dump my laboriously laid logs on my toes.
Over the years, I have no doubt amused and irritated the folks who have delivered and stacked my wood. Because, naturally, I not only watch, I ask questions. Picture that …
The average North Country logger simply does not think of himself as a woodpile poet. Ask how he manages to create a perfectly level surface from logs of wildly varying shapes, each with its own eccentricities of knots and knobs and nubs, and he’ll pause just long enough to shoot you a look that says that you’re one strange duck.
A flatlander for sure.
All this came to mind the other day. I was carrying wood from the shed to the basement and stacking it in front of the furnace. I plunked it down, maybe turned it around, and my stack of wood grew straight and strong, each layer level as a tabletop. Something made me stop and see what I had done.
I just stood there awhile, amazed at the poetry of my pile. Then I laughed out loud. Because I had no idea I’d learned to make rhymes in wood.
Though I know loggers will laugh at me, I think I’ve stumbled on the secret. If you stop trying to force the wood to stack up the way you want and work with it as it is, the logs find their own way to fit together in harmony, nested knot to knob and nub.
It occurs to me that we’d all get along a whole lot better if we learned from logs and listened to woodpile poetry.
Even at eighty he was loose-limbed and lanky, his eyes sparkling with mischief. His jokes were often corny, but he’d tell them with such glee you just had to laugh.
His speech was pure Vermont, which you don’t hear much anymore. Deep as the furrows he’d plowed. Smooth as maple syrup, and just as rich. When I listened to him, those amber tones would flow right through me, slowing my breath to the rhythm of the land. Echoes of the seasons’ ebb and flow resonated in his voice—the gentle, velvet-steel strength of one who works the earth.
He captained no corporations, funded no foundations, and the world at large never took note of him. But on Monday, August 23, 1999, some two hundred people gathered to celebrate his life, mourn his passing, and lay him to rest.
Al LaBay was an ordinary man. An ordinary man who led an extraordinary life.
It was a life founded on faith, salted with humor, and spiced with joy. In his later years, it was a life decorated with the flowers of his gardens, including his roadside Garden of Weedin’ at the heart of Ryegate Corner. He cultivated a bounty of vegetables and raspberries, shared with anyone who knew him. It was the growing he loved, the growing and the giving. He and his wife, Beulah, had modest needs.
You can take the farm from the farmer, but the farmer remains.
Vermont senator and songster Dick McCormack wrote a song memorializing such North Country men:
Here’s to the rare ones,
here’s to the fair ones
who find their way into our lives
to touch them now and then
The gray-haired ones of average size
and what a hurt to realize
when they’re gone they’ll not be back again;
we may never see their kind again.
I sat in the church and listened to family and friends speak of Al. I listened as a collective voice was raised in song. I watched as, almost visibly, the community began to work new threads into the tapestry of its life, weaving strands of fond memories and love abiding into the rend left by Al’s absence.
This, and more. In celebrating Al’s life, we honored the values he lived by. Steward of the land, active citizen, good neighbor, a life of faith practiced—not preached. In this honoring, we reaffirmed the importance of these qualities. I believe this tribute sent each of us home with renewed inspiration to transcend the press of busy-ness and reach out, with joy, to others.
As I looked around at the men, women and children who gathered in remembrance, comforted by bread (and brownies) broken in fellowship, I thought that perhaps my songwriting friend is wrong.
… Perhaps the rare and fair ones leave a legacy that burns so bright, others are forged in the light of their lives.
Quick—how many people do you know actually use their front doors? Special occasions don’t count.
When I first moved here, I drove around quite a bit to get to know the area. I couldn’t figure out why so many homes that otherwise appeared to be finished had no steps leading to the front door. I saw trailers with front doors dangling, houses with front doors hovering.
Now I understand. When you’re building or renovating, money’s tight. You spend it on necessities first. Plumbing, electricity, blasting through ledge to put in a septic system—all these essentials gobble up bucks quicker than folks at a wild game supper. But the ability to use your front door? That’s a frill.
I suspect the problem is that most homes aren’t designed for rough North Country living.
Take our front door. It opens into a small space at the base of the main stairs to the second floor. With the front door open, say “Mother-may-I?” and it’s only one giant step forward to stair one. For me, that is, and I’m only five foot two. For Neil, it’s a baby step.
Everyone with equally ill-planned front doors, raise your hands.
We have another entry through the enclosed front porch and into the kitchen. This door makes sense. Plenty of room for depositing muddy shoes, kicking the snow off your boots, wiping dog paws, and setting down groceries out of the rain, as well as a protected place for the UPS man to leave packages.
I have friends with so-called second entryways into mud-rooms as cluttered as hall closets. Wonderful places. A mud-room tells the family’s story in boots, jackets, shirts, gloves, and hats. Hobbies and habits are revealed in haberdashery hanging on public display.
While pondering this curious state of construction, I asked a local contractor if he’d noticed this front-door phenomenon. North Country carpenters are not accustomed to such queries, so at first Ted looked at me oddly. But then he said I had a point.
“Why have a front door at all?” I asked. “And if you already have one, why not seal it up tight and leave it be?”
“Habit?” he proposed.
That’s my guess. A house without a front door would just seem incomplete, awkward, deprived.
So the next time you hear a nasty crack about how tight Yankee Northerners are, just remember: We’re the folks who indulge in the fanciful frivolity of front doors we hardly ever, sometimes never, use.
There is a cliché about North Country people … they don’t talk about much except the weather. It’s a standard joke in books, movies and television shows.
You’ve seen it. The city slicker moves to the Northeast and encounters two grizzled old-timers at the local lunch counter:
“Cold, innit?”
“A-yuh.”
“Gonna get colder.”
“Likely.”
These exchanges are seen as evidence of limited lives and intelligence. Before living here, I might have snickered with the rest of them at such country cuteness.
But the fact is, for us the weather is like a member of the family—an unpredictable family member at that. The temperamental uncle who drinks a little too much at weddings and must be watched with caution lest he disrupt the occasion. The cousin who causes an uproar with his escapades, the niece with her string of troublesome boyfriends, the cantankerous grandmother who speaks her mind at inopportune times.
The whole family lives on the edge of anticipation. It isn’t a matter of if but when the next incident will occur. Just like the weather.
In other locales, life provides insulation from the elements. Here, it’s personal. Public transportation doesn’t ease us from place to place. That’s my car buried under a foot of newly fallen snow. If I want to get anywhere, I have to deal with it.
Just try to flag a cab in the North Country.
Modern technology fails in the face of nature’s force. Miles of electric lines are at the mercy of overhanging branches. In Ryegate, we rarely lose power altogether, but somewhere down the line a tree tapping a windy rhythm causes lights to flicker, and every flashing electronic gadget must be reset.
Even the satellite dish is subject to storm. A good hard rain or heavy snow sends it into a tizzy. On-screen entertainment is reduced to a single message: “Searching for satellite signal. Please stand by.”
Please stand by. Weather-wise, we have a lot of that. Enough rain to fill your well? Please stand by. Will the foliage festival be blessed with sun? Will there even be leaves on the trees? Rain dates and “weather permitting” are standard fare, our bow to the inevitable beyond our control.
Maybe that’s why country folk come across just a little more humble, a little more plain than their sophisticated city brethren. We have little opportunity to indulge in the illusion that we’re in control.
We know our place.
We know we are not masters of our environment. We are subordinate to the whims of forces that affect every detail of our lives. Plumbing is a modern convenience most take for granted, but when the wind blows and electric lines become the stage for tap-dancing trees, you can’t flush the toilet without the water pump.
And Uncle Albert may well tipple a bit too much at sister Susie’s wedding.
Please stand by.
I know the Enhanced-911 system is a good thing. Emergency services people are in a hurry. Whatever gets them there quicker benefits us all.
And I don’t want to belittle all the folks who’ve put in hundreds of frustrating, tedious hours naming roads, numbering houses, feeding endless lists of addresses into uncooperative computers.
But permit me, please, a sense of loss for my rural route address.
I am not a country girl born or bred. I have had street addresses most of my life. It was only when I moved to Rye-gate Corner ten years ago that I received my rural route ranking.
Newly countrified, I encountered conflicts with most sales-clerks when I ordered from catalogs.
“Box 132A, Rural Route 2,” I’d say, and before I could get to my town and state …
“UPS won’t deliver to post office boxes,” they’d snip at me. “We need a street address.”
“But it’s not a post office box,” I’d explain. “It’s a rural route box. I can’t give you a street address. We don’t have them out here in the country.”
It got so I’d get the jump on them and explain in advance, before confiding my address. But every once in a while, a clerk would chuckle.
“You don’t have to explain to me,” they’d say with delight. “I grew up in the hills of Kentucky.” Or the Virginia mountains, or Iowa farm country, or a little town in Texas …
Chatty conversations would follow. No matter how much they enjoyed their adopted city lives, they’d tell me their country stories with pride and affection.
“I’d like to go back when I have children,” I’d often hear. “The city’s fun, but I want my kids to grow up like I did. In the country.”
They’d talk to me as if I were kin. Surprised at first, I gradually understood. I thought my small-town, rural Vermont life was unique. But country is country.
Across America, country folk are linked, pearls on a string of rural routes.
As metropolis turns into megalopolis and country is cornered by urban sprawl, rural folk feel like we’re on the last outposts of a vanishing frontier. We’re always happy to run into someone from home.
I didn’t know so much was wrapped up in my rural route address until it was taken away.
“Please begin using this new address immediately,” the form letter with my street designation commanded. And thus died the rural route, without fanfare. Too officious for me.
I need to believe in a place where the volunteer firefighters just know where I live. Where “the old Etta White place” is the only address I need. A place where neighbors’ names are landmarks in the directions I give to my home.
I don’t think I’m alone. Look at country music’s explosive popularity. It’s not just that you can hear the words and it has a good beat. Its appeal lies in what the words reveal, and the rhythm is the heartbeat of an American life we don’t want to lose.
I hope someone writes a song. The Ballad of Rural Routes—a web of roads weaving together the country of our country. I’ll sing along.
In Memoriam
RR2, Box 132A
Groton, Vermont
In the wake of the September 11 attacks, thousands of personal stories continue to unfold. We see them on television; we hear them from friends and relatives. As I listen, I am all too aware of the stories we cannot hear from those we have lost.
Each story weaves itself into the fabric of these dark days. They come from around the corner and from around the world. Grappling to grasp the inconceivable, we reach out to one another.
Through cyberspace, many of us have intimate and instantaneous contact with people we would not otherwise have known—and we “speak” more often with family and friends than we would via expensive long-distance phone calls. The neighborhood now has no boundaries.
So when I see the streets of Bradford lined with flags, I think of my friend who lives in a small town in Tennessee. She drove to work one morning to find red, white, and blue bows tied to every stop sign.
I received the same email from friends in San Francisco and in Burlington. On Friday, September 14, at 7 P.M., it read, wherever you are, stop what you’re doing and step outside with candles burning. It will be a gesture of acknowledgment to those lost, those still working to find them, a gesture of unity and resolve.
I imagined what this might look like in a city, and for a moment I wished I could stand with a host of others amid thousands of small flames burning.
The days passed with numbing news, one report worse than the next. By Friday, I am not even sure what day it is. By Friday, I have forgotten the email.
By Friday, we need to get out of the house, away from the television we cannot bear to watch but cannot turn off. We go to the Barge Inn in Woodsville, as we often do. We want a dinner we do not have to cook, but mostly, we just need to be out.
In the midst of dinner, from across the room, I hear Maren—our waitress and the daughter of the restaurant’s owner—saying she’s not sure if they have candles.
I remember.
Soon, seven of us stand outside, lighting our candles from one another’s flames. Neil, Maren, four strangers, and myself. At first, we are self-conscious. But then we quietly talk about where we were when we first heard, and about the deaths of people we knew. We talk quietly about our national grief, about our fears for the days ahead.
It is strangely intimate. Strange, yet comforting. Cars honk as they pass. Somehow they, too, become a part of our circle.
Then one man says, “Let us pray.” And it seems utterly natural to be standing there at the edge of the parking lot with heads bowed, together—religious affiliations unknown—as his spontaneous and heartfelt prayer washes over us.
We blow out our candles. But in our spirits, the flames remain.